“Oh my god! I love your outfit!” The hostess squealed immediately when I arrived at the restaurant, instantly restoring my faith in humanity. She was wearing a very adorable 90’s floral dress a la Winona Ryder in ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’. She even had the whole heroine-chic-waif-look going on, complete with the pixie cut and black cherry lipstick. We chatted happily about vintage clothes as she led me back to where Emma was waiting. For whatever reason, Emma had requested a table way at the back of the restaurant, next to the hotel elevators, so it was quite a walk. All the better, since I wanted to ask about the hostess’ gorgeous tattoos.
“You really can make friends with anyone in two seconds,” Emma said in wonder when I settled in after exchanging numbers with Diane-the-hostess.
I shrugged. “She likes clothes too.”
Emma sighed. “All women like clothes. Not all women can just strike up a conversation like it’s no big deal.” Her voice was wistful.
I’d realized a long time ago that Emma was extraordinarily shy. I didn’t think of myself as an extrovert, but she definitely did. Little did she know, I’d overdeveloped my people skills to try and make friends at my snobby-ass high school, and still been the weird, friendless loner until college.
“What can I say, it’s my super power,” I answered with a sly grin, then adding, “and also my tragic flaw. I honestly can’t avoid talking about whatever pops into my head. I’ve just got a big mouth, at least you’ve got a smart one.”
She didn’t contest the point, but she did grin. “Ok,” she said after a short pause where we ordered mimosas, “if you’re so honest, tell me how you’re feeling about the whole Cole-is-moving-to-Austin thing.”
I took a deep breath, put both my hands flat on the table, and looked her square in the eye. “I don’t know.”
“Did you Google stalk him yet?” she asked, raising a delicate golden eyebrow at me that said she already knew. I nodded in shame. When I didn’t elaborate, she let almost a minute elapse in silence before she followed up. “Well did you at least find out anything good?”
That was a much better question.
“Not really. He had a good career in the NFL. His ranking as a wide receiver was extremely respectable but didn’t win any rings for his teams. He can jump like six feet straight up in the air like a cat…” I trailed off and Emma stared at me until I continued, “He also dated a couple of super-hot girls. He’s clearly single now.” I chose those words carefully and tried to keep my voice neutral.
“And?” Emma pushed.
“And it’s driving me fucking nuts!” My attempt at not sounding like a crazy person had already failed. My mimosa had appeared on the table, and I chugged it in one go. “Why did he have to move back here? I was doing fine, and now it’s like I’m right back to where I was when you met me: a pathetic, moping mess.”
Emma rolled her eyes, scooped up her flute with her tiny fingers and took a delicate sip of her own drink. She made me look like Godzilla, and that was only when I compared our manners. “You weren’t a pathetic moping mess when I met you,” she said. Her voice was gentle.
“I wasn’t exactly functioning normally either.”
“It’s not a crime to be heartbroken.” Heartbroken was putting it mildly. I almost flunked out of college.
“He never even liked me.” Even now, it hurt to say it out loud.
A little line formed between Emma’s green eyes when she frowned at me. “Listen up, sister, you don’t know that,” she said. “You especially don’t know that’s still true. I know I wasn’t there during our freshman year, but I saw the way you two were giving each other fuck-me eyes all during the party.”
My jaw dropped open. “Oh my god, we are going to be sisters, aren’t we?” Somehow, I hadn’t connected those dots. I’d always wanted a sister, although knowing my dad, I probably had a few half siblings off somewhere. But before I could fully digest the prospect of having a real sister, Emma’s other statement sunk in. “And I wasn’t making fuck-me eyes at Cole.”
“Oh, you so were,” Emma corrected. “If looks could fuck, you’d be pregnant right now.”
“No. I’m on the pill.” It wasn’t the best comeback by any means, but it was all I had.
Emma rolled her eyes at me once again, but then instead of returning to my face, they stayed fixed in the distance.
“Cole!” she yelled.
I was now deeply confused. “Huh?”
“Cole!” Emma repeated, using a tone and volume that was totally inappropriate for a brunch conversation. My head whipped around behind me, looking back toward the hotel elevators to see who was now walking toward us: Cole Rylander.
Sweet little Emma, my beloved future sister and dear friend, had just set me up.
6
Kate
“Good morning ladies. Fancy meeting you two here,” Cole said suspiciously as he came up to our table. He was dressed casually, just a pair of what were obviously Levi’s 501 jeans, a plain black t-shirt, and what looked like a green waxed canvas jacket (maybe Filson?). He looked like he ought to be on a billboard. Just the right amount of rugged, but still classy. I even liked the checkered Converse Chucks he was wearing, but only because it was him.
“Yes, what a nice surprise,” Emma said unconvincingly. I wished I could melt into my chair and disappear. My face must have been glowing beet red, because it felt tingly and hot. “Join us?” Emma was saying, “We were just about to order brunch.”
Cole looked from Emma to me several times in quick succession. “Sure.” He sunk down next to us on the other side of the four-top table. “Did Ward tell you I was staying here?” he asked Emma.
Cole’s reactions proved that he hadn’t been in on Emma’s plan to play matchmaker. I couldn’t imagine that Ward would have been either. Emma blinked at Ward in faux-confusion.
“What? Oh, no, Ward didn’t mention it.” She looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh.
Once my initial shock and confusion had worn off, I realized that this was totally in line with Emma’s general MO. She may seem shy, but she was clever and generally got what she wanted. Emma wasn’t too good for a little old-fashioned deception if she thought it would do the trick.
The waiter came around just then and took orders for Cole and I. When he asked Emma what she’d like, she threw a wrist up to her forehead dramatically. Seriously, it was like Scarlett O’Hara faking a feinting spell.
“You know,” she said in a strangely high voice, “I’m feeling a bit dizzy all of a sudden. I think I’ll head home. You two have fun without me.” Then she winked. Emma actually winked. I hadn’t realized she even could.
Cole and I were probably giving her identical disbelieving stares. This was the worst acting of all time, and she was barely even trying. Emma seemed not to notice, or at least, not to care that no one was believing her act. She slid a few bills across the table to pay for her drinks, gathered her coat and purse, and sauntered off. She didn’t walk like she was ill. Instead, I detected a certain triumph to her steps.
Cole and I were left looking at each other in stunned silence.
“Ward said she was the quiet, careful, studious type,” Cole remarked after Emma was gone. He shook his head. “He actually told me to reign it in around her. He was afraid I’d scare her off.”
“Well, Emma is actually all of those things, but she’s also got Ward wrapped firmly around her tiny little finger.” I smirked. “And she’s not nearly the retiring little flower she pretends to be, although sometimes even I forget that.”
Cole grinned. “I can’t believe he ended up with someone like Emma.”
I bristled. “What’s wrong with Emma? She’s my friend, you know.”
His expression turned apologetic. “Nothing’s wrong with her! She’s just Ward’s total opposite. That’s all I meant.”
“I guess that’s true,” I admitted, relaxing. “But they work.”
Cole nodded. Silence descended once again.
�
��That’s a great outfit,” he said eventually. “You look like Parker Posey in ‘House of Yes’.”
The idea that I looked like a deranged, murderous psychopath who was obsessed with Jackie-O might have been insulting to some women, but that was pretty much exactly what I was going for. I also loved that movie. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
He flashed his white smile at me for a second and my heart skipped a beat. “It is a compliment.”
Then, more awkward silence, followed by more uneasy, excruciating staring. I wracked my brain for words to say but couldn’t find two to rub together. Was this how Emma felt all the time? No. My pounding pulse proved that this was more than regular shyness. The waiter brought our food, read the mood at the table, and took off as soon as he could. We ate our first few bites without making eye contact.
Eventually it all became too much. I dropped my fork as a hysterical giggle escaped me, and Cole raised an eyebrow.
“What?” he asked, touching his face and looking down at his shirt to make sure he hadn’t spilled food on himself. “What did I do?”
Seeing Cole looking self-conscious, even in such a small way, only made me giggle more.“Nothing,” I replied, shaking my head and basking for the briefest moment in his relief. “This is just way too awkward. So much for Emma setting us up, huh?”
He smirked at me. “I’ve been on worse dates.”
Were we on a date? Before I could let myself think too deeply about that, I replied. “Worse than our first date?” Even after six years, I still winced when I thought about it.
Cole looked guilty for a moment, but then his small smile returned. “Unfortunately, yes. Much worse.”
“Tell me about one.”
Cole’s smirk turned into a full-blown smile. “One of my other bad dates?”
“Yeah.”
“Only if you reciprocate.”
I thought about it for a second and shrugged. “Sure.” I certainly had plenty of lousy dates to choose from.
“Ok,” Cole began, “so one time my publicist set me up with—”
I interrupted with an unladylike noise of disbelief. “Excuse me? Your publicist?”
He at least had the good manners to look vaguely embarrassed. “Yeah, it was actually Ward’s idea to get a publicist, and it’s becoming more common.”
“Why?” Knowing how much Ward disliked press in general, it was hard to believe.
“He said it was good protection, and he was right. A good publicist goes a long way to keeping your public image and your private life separate, for one. And they can help you build your brand, find opportunities for endorsements, that kind of thing.” He looked a bit sheepish about the whole thing, but it honestly did make sense. I decided not to give him any shit about it.
“I guess that makes sense. Sorry, I got us off track. So, your publicist set you up?”
“Yes. She set me up on a date with a girl whose job was, and I quote, ‘Instagram influencer, cultural anthropologist and tastemaker’.” He shook his head in what looked like disbelief.
That wasn’t ringing any bells from my cyberstalking binge, and also, “what exactly does an Instagram-blah-blah-blah do?”
He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. We never got that far. Apparently, she’d seen me online, liked the look of me, and had her people reach out to my people. I looked at her pictures online and said ok. Normal enough so far, right?”
What a bizarre world he lived in. That was not normal at all, but he seemed to have forgotten that. Just once in my life, I would like to tell someone ‘have your people call my people’ and mean it. What a delightfully powerful feeling that must be.
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“I still don’t know. Despite having hundreds of thousands of followers, she was totally and completely phony.”
“What do you mean?” I was imagining a girl so conceited she couldn’t raise her face up from her screen long enough to hold a conversation.
“I mean she was literally not a real person. She was a computer program. Specifically, she was an experiment that some grad student programmed and then forgot about.”
I blinked at him. “I’m honestly not following you.”
“Her photos were composites of other people. And the locations were taken from other accounts. She’d been made so that her program looked around on the internet and learned what people liked from other Instagram personalities who were popular. Then she would paste her image into their photos and repost them.”
“How does a bot account fool a professional publicist enough ask someone out?”
“She isn’t a bot,” Cole corrected. He seemed to have a begrudging respect for this…creature. “She’s incredibly sophisticated. She’s not an artificial intelligence exactly, but she had been programmed for maximum exposure. One of the things she could do was find other Instagrammable public figures and request to… collaborate with them. She had a whole social media presence that coordinated to look real, a backstory, friends, everything. She sent believable emails and texts. It wasn’t until she didn’t show up at the restaurant that I started to get suspicious.”
“So basically, you dated Skynet.” That was pretty bad. He was successfully catfished by a trolling robot.
“Sort of. Yeah.” He sighed.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a prank Lucas was playing on you?” It sounded a little bit like something he might do.
Cole laughed. “Lucas doesn’t have the skills to pull that off. It was some serious international espionage-level fakery. The FBI was interested in her; she was that good. They called a few months later and asked me a few questions about the whole thing. Lucas is smart, but I don’t think he’s that smart.”
“It does seem like a lot of effort just to embarrass you.” Lucas was also generally committed to using his powers for good—or if not good, money. This wasn’t really his style.
In truth, thinking about Cole being fooled in this way made me feel even guiltier for my cyberstalking. I was really no better than Ms. Skynet, only I hadn’t been programmed to deceive him, just look. Still, I consciously and knowingly chose to invade his privacy. I had free will.
“Your turn,” Cole said, looking at me expectantly.
I smiled my sweetest smile. “One time I punched a guy in the throat and got arrested for felony assault.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cole’s eyes were wide.
“He was asking for it,” I told him. To this day, I was utterly remorseless about the whole thing. “I was on a first date and he tried putting his hand up my skirt within five minutes of sitting down to dinner. It was horrifying. I think he was on drugs or something. We were in full public view.”
Cole looked properly outraged on my behalf. “Sounds like a good throat-punching was exactly what he deserved.”
“Oh, that’s not the half of it. So, like any rational person, I told his ass off and stormed out of the restaurant to wait for my friend to pick me up. He followed me outside and started calling me names, and then we he grabbed my elbow, I punched him again. The problem was, his buddy, who just happened to be an off-duty cop was walking by at that exact moment.” Only I could have such rotten luck.
“I assume the charges were dropped immediately?”
“He didn’t even get done handcuffing me. One of the waitresses from the restaurant—this grizzled, lunch lady type—came outside and screamed at him. It was like something out of a movie.” That moment cemented my commitment to grow up to be like that grizzled, lunch lady. She knew what was what. No one else was saying anything, and we’d made a huge, loud scene inside. But only that one lady stood up for me. She was a total badass and had singlehandedly restored my belief in human decency that day.
I was grinning at the memory of my savior. Cole looked a little disturbed. “That’s awful on many levels. I’m so sorry.”
I shrugged.
“No really,” Cole said. His tone was insistent. “I remember hearing something once. I don’t
remember where it came from, but it was something like this: the thing a man fears the most about a blind date is that the woman will be ugly, while the thing a woman fears most about a blind date is that she’ll be murdered.”
“Jeez, that’s bleak,” I replied. “Accurate, but bleak. Usually it’s not that bad for me, thankfully. I’ve only had to throat punch that one guy. And let me tell you, that asshole went down like rock, and then stayed down.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cole said. His smile was oddly approving. “You don’t need Ward sticking up for you, do you?”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. I can do my own throat-punching, thank you very much.” Then I paused. “Don’t tell Ward about any of that, ok?”
Cole blinked. “He doesn’t know you got assaulted and almost arrested?”
I shook my head. “No. I was still in Plano—that was right after I graduated and before I moved here. Ward was in Austin and it would only make him upset if he knew.”
My brother labored under the misconception that I needed him around all the time, and just knowing about this incident would only reinforce it. In reality, he was the one that needed constant supervision. Between me and Emma, it was still a fulltime job to keep Ward from playing in traffic.
Cole blanched at the request, but then nodded after a moment. “Ok.”
“I should have told you a milder story, sorry. I’m not trying to make you keep secrets from Ward.” I bit my lip.
“No, it’s ok,” he replied. “Really. There are plenty of things Ward doesn’t necessarily need to know about.” My heart did the little fluttery thing again, and I dropped my gaze. When I looked up again there was a look in his eyes, a heat, that hadn’t been there a second before. I’d almost convinced myself I’d imagined it, until he added, “Do you want to go for a walk with me after this? It’s a pretty day and I’d rather not enjoy it alone.”
Kiss Me Like You Missed Me Page 4